FIDELIDAD CANADIENSE Mark Falcoff Under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Canada has come into its own as a defender and sponsor of Fidel Castro--all because it can't stand remaining loyal to the United States. The post-Cold War period has rearranged the furniture of world politics in strange and interesting ways, but perhaps nothing is quite so bizarre as the current alliance between Castro's Cuba and Canada. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not Spain, not Mexico, not even France--but Canada has become Cuba's number one source of foreign investment, its primary source of foreign tourism, its diplomatic protector, its chief patron and advocate. Here are just a few startling facts: Canadian trade with Cuba has doubled or in some areas even tripled in the last two or three years. Some key areas of Canadian investment in Cuba are financed by "soft" credits paid for by Canadian taxpayers. Canada intensively lobbies for Cuba's return to the Organization of American States, with no questions asked about its political regime. This is particularly remarkable given that Canada (unlike Mexico, which also favors Cuba's reinstatement) has long insisted on a political test for other Latin American countries to enter or remain in this organization. Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has made it known that he favors inviting Fidel Castro to participate in the next summit of Western hemisphere leaders, to be held somewhere in Canada in 2000 or 2001. Canadian cities are awash with billboards showing happy families enjoying Cuban beaches (with nary a Cuban in sight). Canada is now the island's leading source of foreign tourists, throwing Castro's police state a lifeline of foreign exchange amounting to several hundred million dollars a year. Sheritt International, one of Canada's largest private firms, has purchased rights to exploit a nickel concession seized from an American company in 1960 and is expanding its activities to cobalt, petroleum exploration and processing, and resort hotels--representing a total of about $1.4 billion. Canada's state-owned television network is a major outlet for Cuban-produced propaganda films on the glories of life in Castro's gulag. Canada is a regular contributor of humanitarian aid to Cuba, including medicines, food, motor vehicles, even paper and pencils for use in schoolrooms. Yet unlike the United States, which also authorizes humanitarian and medical aid, it does not require third-party monitoring to make sure that its contributions are not siphoned off by the Communist party's elaborate apparatus of privilege. While many countries enjoy tweaking the U.S. over Cuba, only Canada has made support for Castro the virtual centerpiece of its foreign policy. Canadian ambassador to the United States Raymond Chrétien, the prime minister's nephew, even admits that he spends as much time talking about Cuba to American authorities as he does about his own. For his part, Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy acknowledges that "Cuba comes up on our radar scope as a much higher priority than before." Canadians, he boasts, "are discovering a whole new world south of our southern neighbor."
While Canadian support for Castro has grown exponentially since the disappearance of his Soviet sponsor, it is not entirely new. Like most Western European countries and Mexico, Canada never broke relations with Havana. Castro was a hero to academic and intellectual circles in Canada from the very beginning, and has remained so long after their counterparts in France, Spain, and Italy broke ranks with him in the 1970's or 1980's over his persecution of writers, artists, and homosexuals. As long ago as 1976 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret made a pilgrimage to the island, where they went scuba diving with the dictator (whom Mme. Trudeau declared "the sexiest man alive"). On that same occasion Trudeau peremptorily signed away the property claims of Canadian citizens expropriated by the regime for a mere $850,000. (His involvement with matters Cuban continues; he is now a "paid consultant" to one of the Canadian companies subsidizing Castro's biotech industry.) Two years after Trudeau's visit another Canadian government, somewhat surprisingly, canceled its modest aid program to Cuba to protest Castro's interventions in Africa. And that is where matters stood until 1994, when Jean Chrétien's Liberals swept into power. Sensing that the Clinton administration itself didn't much believe in many of its own policies--and was temperamentally and ideologically incapable of going to the mat for U.S. national interests--Chrétien set about baiting the United States on a wide variety of issues, some substantive, some symbolic.1 Cuba is an important case of both substance and symbolism. Hence Foreign Minister Axworthy's visit to the island in January of last year, during which he signed a series of largely meaningless accords, including one which would allow Canada to help train Cuban judges and legal officers--as if the problem of due process on the island was a mere matter of technical competence! Even more cynically, the two countries agreed to "cooperation" on human rights matters. The Canadian equivalent of our Internal Revenue Service will also launch a $3.6 million, three-year program to help the Castro government create a new tax collection system, wherewith to confiscate the few sources of private income available to individual Cubans--tips from tourists or remittances from relatives abroad. The most spectacular development in recent times, however, has been the state visit last April of Prime Minister Chrétien, the most important leader of any democratic country to set foot on the island since the revolution. The Chrétien visit was a massive propaganda coup for Castro, since Canada is (wrongly) perceived by people around the world, and indeed perhaps by many Americans, as a particularly close friend of the United States. With friends like Chrétien and Axworthy, who really needs enemies? The official Canadian line on Cuba--the one at least retailed for American consumption--is one of respectful disagreement. As International Cooperation Minister Pierre Pettigrew has said, "We share with the Americans the wish to see Cuba become more democratic--although we obviously do not share the American view as to the means of achieving that." On the other hand, many Canadian leaders seem more frightened that something might change in Cuba than that Castro's repressive dictatorship might continue indefinitely. The Americans, Axworthy told the press after his recent visit, favor "a total disruption of the regime." This, he says, would be bad, inasmuch as it would lead to "upheaval" and be "disruptive." Axworthy sees no reason to rush into things. "Look at Russia," he remarked. "Simply having an election doesn't give you democracy." Castro himself has often said much the same. Axworthy later claimed that during hisvisit he accomplished more in five hours of talks with the Cuban dictator than the Americans had achieved with thirty years of isolation and embargo. "We didn't get a 24-hour transformation into a full-blown parliamentary democracy, but we established an opening." In a breathtaking leap of logic, he added, "if what the U.S. Congress wants is to see changes take place in Cuba—and we support those changes, but go about it in a different way--I can't see what they have to complain about." A Canadian-sponsored political opening in Cuba? That would certainly be news to three prominent dissidents who were arrested during Axworthy's visit. Or the dozens who have been detained on a regular basis every month since then. Or to four Cuban human rights activists who issued an open letter after Axworthy's departure decrying Canada's collaboration with the regime and expressing dismay that the minister "avoided all contact" with opposition groups. Or to Dr. Desi Mendoza, a Cuban doctor who has been in prison for over a year, his only crime having been to criticize Castro's handling of an epidemic of dengue fever. Doubtless it would be even more startling news to the Cuban authorities themselves, who professed complete satisfaction with the Canadian foreign minister's obsequious conduct. Castro himself described his three-hour lunch with Axworthy as an encounter "among friends. Among friends you can talk about everything." For his part, Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina went out of his way to thank the Canadian delegation "for seeking to understand Cuba rather than simply condemn a situation they had not studied." And he added in a telling coda that, in contrast to the United States and indeed some other countries, Cuba's relations with Canada were suffused with "mutual respect." For those unfamiliar with the rhetoric of Latin American dictatorships, "mutual respect" means the willingness of an outside power to forego criticism of a regime's internal arrangements. Just to make sure the United States did not miss the point, Chrétien during his April visit listened indulgently while Castro publicly accused the U.S. of "genocide" and "a new version of the Holocaust." Chrétien then signed accords with the Cuban dictator for "cooperation" in the areas of health, film, and sports. He seemed rather lukewarm, however, about pressing for the changes he claims he wants. (He refused to meet with Elizardo Sánchez, the island's most prominent dissident.) Not that it would have made any difference. As soon as Chrétien's plane cleared Cuban air space, Castro told the press that he wasn't bending to pressures to change his system from any quarter; not just from enemies like the United States but "friends like Canada." --------------------------------------------- (1) At a NATO summit in Madrid in July 1997, an inadvertently open microphone captured some priceless remarks by Chrétien in conversation with the prime ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg about his relations with President Bill Clinton. He was particularly abusive about foreign policy decisions in the U.S., which, he claimed, were driven entirely by domestic considerations. In the process, however, he let slip that Canadian foreign policy wasn't all that different. "I like to stand up to the Americans. It's popular.... The Cuba affair, I was the first to stand up.... People like that." He added, "But you have to be careful because they're our friends." Friends?! back to text |